Death Is a Lonely Business (19 page)

No one deserves to be killed.

No?

A final wave came in behind the shape there on the shore. It broke up into a series of cracked mirrors that fell and seemed to envelop the man. He was erased. When the wave pulled back out he was gone, perhaps running away north along the sands.

Back past the lion cage in the canal, past the canary lady's empty windows, back past my apartment with its winding-sheet bed.

"Ready?" Constance Rattigan called from inside.

Not really, I thought.

Inside, Constance said, "Come see the old lady made young."

"You're not old," I said.

"No, by God." She ran around turning off lights and fluffing pillows in the middle of the room. "This health nut's writing a book, out next year. Underwater gymnastics. Sex at low tide. What bicarbs to take after you eat the local football coach. What, my God. You're blushing again. What do you know about girls?"

"Not much."

"How many you had?"

"Not many."

"One," she guessed, and crowed when my head bobbed. "Where is she tonight?"

"Mexico City."

"When's she coming back?"

"Ten days."

"Miss her? Love her?"

"Yes."

"You want to telephone her and stay on the phone all night so her voice protects you from this dragon lady?"

"I'm not afraid of you."

"Like hell you're not. You believe in body warmth?"

"Body?"

"Warmth! Sex without sex. Hugs. You can give this old gila monster canned heat without losing virtue. Just hold and hug, spoon fashion. Keep your eyes on the ceiling. That's where the action is. Films all night until the dawn comes up like Francis X. Bushman's erection. Sorry. Damn. Come on, son. Let's hit the sack!"

She sank into the pillows, pulling me after, at the same time stabbing some buttons on a control console imbedded in the floor. The last lights went out. The sixteen-millimeter projector started humming. The ceiling filled with light and shadow.

"Look. How d'you like that?"

She pointed up with her beautiful nose.

Constance Rattigan, twenty-eight years back in time, on the ceiling, lit a cigarette.

Down beside me, the real lady blew smoke.

"Wasn't I a bitch!" she said.

I woke at dawn not believing where I was. I woke incredibly happy, as if something beautiful had happened in the night. Nothing had, of course, it was just sleeping among so many rich pillows by a woman who smelled like spice cabinets and fine parquetry. She was a lovely chess game carved and set in a store window when you were a kid. She was a freshly built girl's gym, with only the faintest scent of the noon tennis dust that clings to golden thighs.

I turned in the dawn light.

And she was gone.

I heard a wave come along the shore. A cool wind blew in through the open French doors. I sat up. Far out in the dusky waters I saw an arm flash up and down, up and down. Her voice called.

I ran out and dove in and swam halfway to her before I was exhausted. No athlete this. I turned back and sat waiting for her on the shore. She came in at last and stood over me, stark naked this time.

"Christ," she said, "you didn't even take off your underwear. What's happened to modern youth?"

I was staring at her body.

"How you like it? Pretty good for an old empress, huh? Good buzz-um, tight rump, marceled pubic hairs…"

But I had shut my eyes. She giggled. Then she was gone, laughing. She ran up the beach half a mile and came back, having startled only the gulls.

Next thing I knew the smell of coffee blew along the shore, with the scent of fresh toast. When I dragged myself inside she was seated in the kitchen, wearing only the mascara she had painted around her eyes a moment before. Blinking rapidly at me, like some silent screen farm girl, she handed me jam and toast, and draped a napkin daintily over her lap, so as not to offend while I stared and ate. She got strawberry jam on the tip of her left breast. I saw this. She saw me seeing this and said, "Hungry?"

Which made me butter my toast all the faster.

"Good grief, go call Mexico City."

I called.

"Where are you?" demanded Peg's voice, two thousand miles away.

"In a phone booth, in Venice, and it's raining," I said.

"Liar!" said Peg.

And she was right.

And then, quite suddenly, it was over. It was very late, or very early. I felt drunk on life, just because this woman had taken time to play through the hours, talk through the darkness until the sun, way over in the east, beyond the fogs and mists, threatened to appear.

I looked out at the surf and shore. Not a sign of bodies drowned, and no one on the sand to know or not know. I didn't want to go but I had a full day's work ahead, writing my stories just three steps ahead of death. A day without writing, I often said, and said it so many times my friends sighed and rolled their eyeballs, a day without writing was a little death. I did not intend to pitch me over the graveyard wall. I would fight all the way with my Underwood Standard which shoots more squarely, if you aim it right, than any rifle ever invented.

"I'll drive you home," said Constance Rattigan.

"No, thanks. It's just three hundred yards down the beach. We're neighbors."

"Like hell we are. This place cost two hundred thousand to build in 1920, five million today. What's your rent? Thirty bucks a month?"

I nodded.

"Okay, neighbor. Hit the sand. Come back some midnight?"

"Often," I said.

"Often." She took my two hands in hers, which is to say into the hands of the chauffeur and the maid and the movie queen. She laughed, reading my mind. "You think I'm nuts?"

"I wish the world were like you."

She shifted gears to avoid the compliment.

"And Fannie? Will she live forever?"

My eyes wet, I nodded.

She kissed me on both cheeks and pushed. "Get outa here." I jumped from her tiled porch into the sand, ran a step, turned, and said, "Good day, princess." "Shit," she said, pleased. I ran away.

Nothing much happened that day. But that night . . .

I woke and glanced at my Mickey Mouse watch, wondering what had pulled me up. I shut my eyes tight and ached my ears, listening.

Rifle fire. Bang, bong and again bang, bong and again bang, down the coast, from the pier.

My God, I thought, the pier's almost empty and the rifle gallery shut, and who could be out there, middle of the night, yanking the trigger and belling the target?

Bang and bang and the sound of the struck gong. Bang and bong. Again and again. Twelve shots at a time and then twelve more and then twelve more, as if someone had lined up three and then six and then nine rifles and jumped from an empty one to a loaded one without a breath and aimed and fired and fired and fired.

Madness.

It had to be. Whoever it was, alone on the pier in the fog, seizing the weapons, firing at Doom.

Annie Oakley, the rifle lady herself? I wondered.

Bang. Take that you son-of-a-bitch. Bang. Take that you bastard runaway lover. Bang. Take that you unholy womanizing freak. Bang!

Wham and again wham, far off but blowing in the wind.

So many bullets, I thought, to make something impossible die.

It went on for twenty minutes.

When it was over, I could not sleep.

With three dozen wounds in my chest, I groped over to my typewriter and, eyes shut, typed out all the rifle shots in the dark.

“Offisa Pup?"

"How's that again?"

"Offisa Pup, this is Krazy Kat."

"Jesus," said Crumley. "It's you. Offisa Pup, eh?"

"It's better than Elmo Crumley."

"Got me there. And Krazy Kat's right for you, scribe. How goes the Great American Epic?"

"How goes the Conan Doyle sequel?"

"This is embarrassing, but ever since I met you, son, I'm doing four pages a night. It's like a war: should be outa there by Christmas. Krazy Kats, it turns out, are good influences. That's the last compliment you get from the Offisa. It's your nickel. Speak."

"I got more possibilities for our list of maybe future victims."

"Jesus in the lilies, Christ on the cross," sighed Crumley.

"Funny how you never notice…"

"It's a laugh riot. Proceed."

"Shrank still leads the parade. Then Annie Oakley, or whatever her real name is, the rifle marksman lady. Someone, last night, was shooting on the pier. It had to be her. Who else? I mean, she wouldn't open up her place, two in the morning, for a stranger, would she?"

Crumley interrupted.

"Get her real name. I can't do anything without her real name."

I felt one of my legs being pulled by him and shut up.

"Cat got your tongue?" said Crumley.

Silence from me.

"You still there?" asked Crumley.

Grim silence.

"Lazarus," said Crumley, "damn it to hell, come outa that Christ-awful tomb!"

I laughed. "Shall I finish the list?"

"Let me grab my beer. Okay. Shoot."

I reeled off six more names, including, though I didn't really believe it, Shapeshade's.

"And maybe," I finished, and hesitated, "Constance Rattigan."

"Rattigan!" yelled Crumley. "What the hell you know about Rattigan? She eats tiger's balls on toast and can whipsaw sharks two falls out of three. She'd walk out of Hiroshima with her earrings and eyelashes intact. Annie Oakley, now, no to her, too. She'd rifle someone's butt off before he, no, only way is some night, on her own, she might toss all her guns off the pier and follow after;
that's
in her face. As for Shapeshade, don't make me laugh. He doesn't even know the real world exists out here with us grotesque normals. They'll bury him in his Wurlitzer come 1999. Got any more bright ideas?"

I swallowed hard and finally decided to at last tell Crumley about the mysterious disappearance of Cal the barber.

"Mysterious, hell," said Crumley. "Where you been? The Mad Butcher skedaddled. Piled his tin lizzie with dregs from his shop just the other day, pulled out of the no-parking zone in front of his place, and headed east. Not west, you notice, toward Land's End, but east. Half the police force saw him make a big U-turn out front the station and didn't arrest him because he yelled, 'Autumn leaves, by God, autumn leaves in the Ozarks!' "

I gave a great trembling sigh of relief, glad for Cal's survival. I said nothing about Scott Joplin's missing head, which was probably what drove Cal off and away forever. But Crumley was still talking. "You finished with your super-brand-new list of possible deads?"

"Well…" lamely.

"Dip in ocean, then dip in typewriter, says Zen master, makes for full page and happy heart. Listen to the detective advising the genius. The beer is on the ice, so that the pee is in the pot, later. Leave your list at home. So long, Krazy Kat."

"Offisa Pup," I said. "Goodbye."

The forty dozen rifle shots from last night drew me. Their echoes would not stop.

And the sound of more of the pier being pounded and compacted and eaten away drew me, as the sounds of war must draw some.

The rifle shots, the pier, I thought, as I dipped in the ocean and then dipped in my typewriter, like the good kat Offisa Pup wished me to be, I wonder how many men, or was it just one, Annie Oakley killed last night.

I wonder, also, I thought, placing six new pages of incredibly brilliant novel in my Talking Box, what new books of drunken doom A. L. Shrank has toadstool-farmed on his catacomb library shelves?

The Hardy Boys Invite Ptomaine?

Nancy Drew and the Weltschmerz Kid?

The Funeral Directors of America Frolic at Atlantic City?

Don't go look, I thought. I must, I thought. But don't laugh when you see the new titles. Shrank might run out and
charge
you.

Rifle shots, I thought. Dying pier. A. L. Shrank, Sigmund Freud's Munchkin son. And now, there, up ahead of me hiking on the pier:

The Beast.

Or, as I sometimes called him, Erwin Rommel of the Afrika Korps. Or, sometimes, simply:

Caligula. The Killer.

His real name was John Wilkes Hopwood.

I remember reading one of those devastating reviews about him in a small local Hollywood theater some years before:

John Wilkes Hopwood, the matinee assassin, has done it again to another role. Not only has he torn a passion to tatters, he has, madness maddened, stomped on it, ravened it with his teeth, and hurled it across the footlights at unsuspecting club ladies. The damned fools ate it up!